How The Last of Us Remastered will benefit Uncharted 4's development

Naughty Dog has explained how working on The Last of Us Remastered will benefit development on future PS4 projects such as Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

After the release of The Last of Us on PS3, the studio - which was already working on the PS4 at the time - thought the port would be a "great opportunity" to become better accustomed to the architecture following the pains of jumping between console development in the PS2 to PS3 era.

"We've been developing for PS4 for a while, and obviously eventually we announced that we are doing Uncharted 4, so we've been working on those tools and everything for a while," community strategist Arne Meyer told Digital Spy.

"We were saying it would be a really good opportunity to test how good our development is by porting a game over onto the PS4 engine, because back when we went from the PS2 to the PS3 console generation, it was really painful for us to develop an engine and a game at the same time.

"There's a lot of things we learned about our engine capabilities and our tools pipeline throughout development that would have been a lot easier for us. The game looked great, but it would have been a lot of easier for us to find it sooner rather than later, so we thought this was a great opportunity to try that out."

He added: "It helped us really test the tools that we were writing specific to the PS4 engine, and it helped us work on our pipeline.

"The easiest way to say is it accelerated our engine development progress, just to be able to move what we were trying to do with the PS4 engine even further."

Elsewhere, Meyer discussed comments recently made by Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida that the Uncharted series would be a good candidate for a PS4 remaster, agreeing that such ports "would be a good way to provide a way for our familiar players" to play the series again.

"When we look at the PS4 generation, especially in the US - I don't know what the general feeling was in Europe - there were a lot of people who are new to PlayStation platforms, and may have not played Uncharted," he said.

"It would be a good time for us to leverage all the attention behind it and make it look better. It would be really cool to have. Shuhei really likes the Uncharted series quite a bit, and I think it would be a great way to introduce - I wouldn't say a new generation - but to expand the people that are bound to know Uncharted."

He continued: "Since it's the first time that we're releasing a franchise across different platforms, it would be a good way to provide a way for our familiar players to go back and play the entire series with visual parity.

"I don't know if we're able to do that, but it's a really clever idea. It would be nice to see if we can figure that out and pull that off."